theres an old philosophy that Douglas Addams" sort of quoted.
If ever discover what the universe is for , it will disappear and be immediately be replaced by something far more bizzarely inexplicable.
and what happened when we unwrapped the big bang,
we got string theory and quantum physics that told us that not only weren't we the only universe
but we came from a place that has 11 dimensions and no time.]

I think this universe is stranger than we can imagine.


But, do i believe in God. NO. I don't

Marcus

PS but if reality can be described as God, then you need not look no further.

So yes dystopic i do think this reality is beyond my understanding and truly full of wonders

I ask you a question to you. do you believe that God is holding back information.
Is it is the nature of intelligence to answer all questions and ultimately know all that God knows

ah i see where we differ now.

Your worried it might not be right, oh no! what happens beneath the event horizon in a black hole!

If I'm satisfied on the evidence that it is correct, thats good enough for me. However, and I see this as the critical distinction that you have to make, should someone present you with evidence that challenges your assumption you have to look at it and make a re-evaluation of your ideas.

you worry too much.

I am always amazed at how both the theist and the atheist like to discuss religion and science as in competition to give the best explanation for our universe. People who hold that science should inform theology or that theology should inform science often make the same mistaken assumption. It is a peculiar claim to say that the universe is just composed of energy, strings, (or whatever the physics of the day talks about) and that therefore there is no soul etc. etc.. By the same reasoning, the persons who hold such a position must also claim that there is 'really' no colour to the universe (and they often do).

Why is this so peculiar? Because it assumes that physics is the sole authority on settling matters of truth and existence. Language is used in a lot of different ways and we need not interpret every claim in our everyday lives (inclduing our religious practices) as somehow put forward to make the same sort of claims that are made in physics journals. If I say that "John wishes to drink a glass of water" or "pork prices have been rising again", we can assess the appropriateness of my claim without looking to whatever the popular theory in physics happens to be today. Why is it that someone could correctly understand what I say if they heard hundreds of years ago? Because the correct use and understanding of the language is independent of the use of the language developed by physicists. That is, our ordinary use of language (including much of theological language) is wholly independent of the correct use of the language of physics (which largely includes how physics as a science is practiced).

But are the practices and language constituting what we call the science of physics independent of our everyday use of language (which is independent of the language of physics)? Absolutely not. We developed a science of physics because it was useful to do so and we could see how picking out regularities in moving objects could help us in our day to day lives. When there are major paradigm shifts in a science (like from Newtonian physics to Einsteinian physics) it does not occur because someone has discovered new experiment results typically. Rather what happens is that a new more useful way of conceptualizing the subject matter is arrived at. Look back at how Newton argued in favour of his theory of space and time against the followers of Descartes. Many of the arguments are themselves based on theology and appeals to everyday intuitions.

The person who tries to advocate that physics gets the final word on settling truth and existence first makes a rather imperialistic and dogmatic claim that only that which can correctly and acurately articulated in the language of physics is correct and true etc.. Physics is given a certain authority for settling some matters, but it certainly does not have authority over most (nor should it be given such authority).
SEcondly, the claim rests on a complete misunderstanding of the development of sciences and languages generally. Physics in many respects answers to the culture that practices it and institutes it as a science. At this point to claim that physics is special because it 'really' gets at 'the world' is to completely miss the point. For that is precisely what is being debated. It does not have complete authority.

The theist makes the same mistake when trying to show how certain doctrines correspond to going theories of the day (or get involved in creation-evolution debates). Theological texts are not meant to be scientific texts. This does not mean that they are not true, just that the langauge is different and characterizes a different aspect of our lives which a science such as physics is not well suited to do.

I ask both the theist and the atheist (or agnostic) to step back for a second and think about what they are so blindly assuming when they treat the "natural world" as only consisting of that which is described by physics. All sciences have a hugely important place in our society, but nonscientific languages need not answer to them and in fact is the domain where we debate our scientific concepts.

Lovely,
Red Priest

i wouldn't say i 'worried' at all, not about the science anyway. what i said is the truth of science. i don't think we should abandon science or throw out the theory of general relativity. all i think scientists should do is what they're already doing: research. in time, that will produce a newer and more reconciled theory of physics.

i only made the observation because i saw people throwing around scientific knowledge with the zealous irrationality normally credited to religious sycophants. and like religious sycophants, they seem to lack an accurate knowledge of what they preach.

stupid me for caring.

Hmm, doing more research on the information stuff, especially as it pertains to the debate about the origin of species.

It seems creationists are not necessarily saying information gain is impossible - just that it tends towards loss rather than gain.

Natural selection does not necessarily save the evolutionist in this case: Natural selection only selects on whether mutations increase the odds of survival, not on how much information is present in the genes. If a mutation that increases the odds of survival happens to also decrease the amount of information in the genes, then natural selection would choose less information, not more.

The creationists then argue that while the odds of survival in a particular environment may be increasing, the amount of information is, on average, decreasing. This may have adverse effects on the mutants if the environment changes and the information to survive in the new environment is lost due to the mutation.

If the amount of information is overall decreasing as they claim, it would adversely affect the hypothesis that molecules slowly changed into humans over long periods of time.

I am a Christian, not an aethesit but I can understand why you are Aethesits. I blame the American Church, it goes out of its way to be confrontation and a pain in the asses. Jessus said to use that he sends us out like sheep into wolves. or something to that effect, in america it seems the other way round.

The main reason I thing the American churches, does damage to themselves is because they are literalist, not fundermentalist. A fundermentalist believes in the fundermentals not the specifics. Just look at the Catholic church, they don't mess themselves up with arguements over which verse means which rather they follow the traditions that they inspire. Where as the American churches loose this and rather thing that by bludenging their beleives on everyone else they will save them. This is no better than those Jehovas Witness, who are not even Christian but a weird mix of Jeudaism and Christian texts.

If you where to let people sit and thing about the matter without the church yelling its head of every few mintues decaring that you will burn in hell. Everybody will find God even if they do not name him as such.

missed the point slightly. it's not that molecules do evole into humans; it's that they happened to evolve into humans. evolution doesn't have a goal in mind.

i'm not clear on why you see evolution and information loss/gain as tied together. if i had the sources you've been reading, i'd be intersted in reading them myself, so we can work from the same knowledge base.



yes, the theory of evolution does not guarentee that things will keep on living. it doesn't guarantee that all life won't all die off in an asteroid strike. it doesn't guarantee that anything in particular will live if the global temperature rises suddenly.

i remember your line of thinking about information and evolution more or less, so forgive me if i'm repeating myself: your line of thinking about evolution seems to suffer from the reification fallacy.

evolution isn't a conscious force, it's (described by its adherants) as a natural law. it doesn't have goals anymore than genreal relativity does. someones science writers use literary techniques such as personification to describe a system, but the doesn't mean the system mimics human behavior (and it probably doesn't mean that we mimic the system's behavior).

all that said, i tend to agree with you:



you're simulteneously describing over-specialization, and it happens. most life forms cannot predict the way their enviornments might behave differently in the future, and none we've studied take that speculation into account when selecting mating parnters.

i'd be really interested to know how these theorists/researchers you were reading qualified 'information loss.' a lot of DNA is junk, leftover information from evolutionary anscestors.

as far as my understanding goes, for the sake of our discussion here there are 3 types of gene. these are certainly not technical terms.

there are inactive genes, as i just described. they just take up space; they also might become active again in subsequent evolution.

there are simple active genes, which are doing something. in other words, they provide instructions for replicating chemicals the body will use.

then there are meta-active genes. these genes might do some things directly, but their primary function is to mitigate, coordinate and control the rest of the genes. i imagine there's probably some parity in complex computer systems.

the point is, if by 'information loss,' they include deactivation or complete loss of inactive genes, they're talking about a great deal of genetic changes that produce no noticeable change in the life form.

this might make evolution seem even less likely. but just because the laws are strange, is that reason to believe they're innacurate? general relativity and quantum field theory are both very far from being common-sense ways of interpreting the universe. but so far these theories' power to predict the outcome of experiments has been undeniable.

unfortunately, the human time scale isn't going to allow us to create a lab experiment that will take us from molecules to cells, mitochondira, multi-cellular life, segmented bodies, predatory behavior, social behavior, or intelligence.

we might be able to recreate the earliest instances of life in labratory experiments, and i think we might already be doing that. it's saturday morning, so i'm not about to go hunting for an article i kinda remmeber. maybe monday.

Cobra, you seem genuinely interested in the scientific ideas. i certainly don't discredit you for being skeptical; in fact i commend you for it. criticism is the healthiest thing for the individuals, (IMHO), in science (a social fact), and in civic life (an historical rarity). the truth is, scientists definately can't answer even all of their own questions - and they tend to be picky about questions.

i'm currently reading Consilience: The Unity of Knolwedge. wikipedia actually has an outline for it,. though sparse. the idea might intrigue you. i'm not quite sure how i feel about the full extent of his argument quite yet, myself.



i'd credit science as the set of tools that empower people to rid themselves of superstition. that doesn't make scientists "better" people in any sense, but they do contribute to history in a qualitatively unique way.

Some good discussion here, but I wonder about this last point being a wee on the trivial side in that it is not unique to natural science. Don't all semi-critical disciplines develop tools that contribute to history in a qualitatively unique way and try to be rid of superstition? The opposition to superstition is not just science, but any discourse that respects having intellectual integrity (or being intellectually responsible). There is no point even discussing the appropriateness of believing that killing spiders makes it rain or that certain numbers are bad luck. There is no theoretical framework to discuss and debate such issues. One view is as good as any other.

In any well developed discipline, including theology, the arbitrariness and intellectual carelessness that leads people to accept weird superstitions is shunned. Theologians give reasons for why one theory (which I use in a loose sense) is better than another and there are plenty of rational grounds that can be appealed to when weighing the merits of competing theological claims. Actually studying ancient religious texts and constructing plausible interpretations of them that cohere with other interpretations and the like is extremely demanding work. It is not unlike the intellectual rigor that occurs in natural science when weighing different and competing theories that can characterize various lab results. When claiming that certain experimental results demonstrate that some hypothesis is (likely) correct, one must always be careful to evaluate one's characterization of the results and how the hypothesis coheres with various other claims made in scientific discourse. (For an awesome read check out Thomas Kuhn's "structure of Scientific Revolutions" and WVO Quine's "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" Two of 20th centuries most important texts about the nature of science. Not that I agree with everything said in them)

I am not denying your claim that science provides tools for ridding superstition, but denying what seems implicit in your claim -that science unlike other disciplines develops tools for ridding supstition. All well developed disciplines do that and thay all contribute to our history in important and unique ways.

Sounds good, but I'd like to see this "junk." Have any references?

I wasn't so much reading as watching - the information I obtained came from Answers in Genesis' videos - in this case, the "origin of the species" series of videos.
http://www.answersingenesis.org/video/ondemand/



How so?



Or during different phases of the organism's life, or under certain environmental conditions.

In any case, they're definitely talking about active or control genes, as their examples include stuff like bacterial resistance. They're not just talking about genes what have no effect.

They do point out, however, that not knowing what something does does not necessarily qualify it as "junk." There is a lot we don't know about DNA. Finding out the sequence of the bases was simply the first step - finding out what everything does is totally different, and it will be a long time before we know for sure what the purpose (or lack thereof) of everything is.

To put it into a linguistic metaphor: We know what the alphabet is, and we've obtained a copy of a book. We also know where the words are separated (ie, the start and stop codons). What's left is to find the meanings of the words (the proteins created), and to put them together to form larger language structures and figure out the meaning (how the proteins interact with everything else).



Yes, it would be strange for a downward trend in complexity to lead to something more complex. But more than strange - contradictory. That's like saying if you subtract 1 from a number enough times you will get a number far larger than the number you started with.



It is rather unfortunate, isn't it?

But Science started in the realm of religion and also other religions have said this before.

The problem is what is a superstition? I have heard that believing that its bad luck to walk under a ladder is a superstition. Is it? Well that depends will bad thing JUST happen, nope... how ever you can hurt yourself when you go through the ladders space, or mayhaps the person on top falls cause you moved it just so, so maybe it really is bad magic.

You have to think about WHY these things came about its not like Science never creates superstition either. We have all heard the ramblings of a few superstitious folk here, what are you going to do? Excommunicate them? Now what would SCIENCE sound like if it does that?

Yet if science comes from faith, the faith comes from the core of science.... that being the the application of seemingly logical conclusions based on the information at hand. At the time, the only information humanity had was that they didn;t understand anything. So the Personification of something that was outside their power to control must have seemed normal. I for example am useless at fixing cars, so when my car has a problem, it is called a "she" usually something like "grumpy cow"... If something goes wrong i'm powerless, and so the car gains a personality. My PC however, is just a machine, that if something brakes, I fix it.

Aside from that, there was religion for at least 10,000 years in some form or other before the big 3 came into being.. we know they stole stories from all over the M.E. and such, and rejigged them. We know that before Zoroastrianism, faiths were mainly Polythesic.. so arguably, these beliefs are at least 8000 years older.. does this not make them more legitimate based on age? If it is not about the age, but about the revealed truth of those beliefs, then is not Athesim simply the newst of the those revealed truths?

The only choice with faith is to try a do what the "good" book says.. but that leads to the Ned Flanders problem "I've done everything the Bible says - even the stuff that contradicts the other stuff!"

It's easier having no faith, because I decide who I am, I choose the path of my life, and if I do wrong, I know i've done wrong by myself, and not try to say I was guided by a higher power. I don't get forgivness, simply by embracing some voodoo man in the sky, I ask for it from the people i've hurt. They may grant it to me, or they may not. That's even assuming I want the forgivness in the first place. If I apparently do not have my moral choices guided by faith and a holy source, then does that not make me more Holy than "true" believers? lol

While being critical of faith in this post, i'm not one to limit peoples belief in it, as long as they do not try to limit me. An Ex of mine was christian, I still think she is one of the nicest girls i've met. In fact I met her by stating my dislike for Christians... she pointed out she was one, and I tried to take my foot out of my mouth as a result. Anyway, when she said that she prayed for me and my family every night before she went to bed, that meant a lot to me, because I knew it meant something to her. I thought i'd find it distasteful, but being with her showed me her sincerity. After 2 years, she became more open to new ideas, while I modified some of my undesirable behaviours to be more in line with her beliefs. I found then that my dislike of faith was an emotional one, and that if I was to continue with my view, I needed to to have a more academic, studied one too.

The trick I learnt in the end, is that good humoured joking and debating between both views is good, it teaches us something about the other, and creates I think an understanding and tolerance. Yet i'm human, and I tarnish the majority with the same Brush, but while I don't like Christians, or the French, or the English, on an individual basis I am friends with a number of all 3, who i respect and trust with my life. Though in the case of the English, I have found the I've only liked a minority of the ones I have met....



What gets me though, are the current batch of "true" Christians that exist in the US at the moment. They really are just as bad as the crazy Islamics we have running around, and if you believe the left, Zionists too! Here are some quotes from Americas current main holders of power, they don't inspire confidence.. i

Quotes from American Taliban:

Ann Coulter

"We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war."

George Bush Sr.

"I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God."


Henry Morris (Founder, Institute for Creation Research, died 2006)
"When science and the Bible differ, science has obviously misinterpreted its data."

Randall Terry (Talking of Homsexuals)
"When I, or people like me, are running the country, you'd better flee, because we will find you, we will try you, and we'll execute you. I mean every word of it. I will make it part of my mission to see to it that they are tried and executed."

[I]Robert Simonds (Citizens for Excellence in Education)
"Atheistic secular humanists should be removed from office and Christians should be elected...Government and true Christianity are inseparable."[/I]

n. pl. the·o·ries
1. A set of statements or principles devised to explain a group of facts or phenomena, especially one that has been repeatedly tested or is widely accepted and can be used to make predictions about natural phenomena.

okey seriously. whats with the crap of america beeing a nation under god. why the hell would god watch over just one nation.
im not saying all americans are this way. but ur freaking president is an ass and pshyco.
I am an atheist. I belive in science and things that can be proved. I relize everything in science cannot be proved. But its easier to grasp something that u actually can feel or touch or learn about. God on the other hand, well its a question of faith. To belive in something with ignorrance and not questioning it is just stupid.
My girlfriend tells me not everything can be explained with science. Different types of miracles, for example. And i relize that. But what we can explaine and cannot is only limited by our knowledge. What we know today may not be enough to explaine a miracle but what we learn tomorrow might. Saying well its gods work just because there is no other explination is an easy way out of it.
I think we humans seek easy answers to everything thats why religion exist. Not everyone on this planet wants to know that our lifes are basicly a random thing that happend on this planet.. That there is no real point to it other than to survive and reproduce. Religion gives people something to hope for, something that is easier to understand cause it takes less of an effort to understand.

I appoligize for the english. Im swedish. So bare with me   // Thanx

Luckily, we don't consider the words of other Christians to be gospel - yes, even within our own ranks there is the occasional extremist who takes a concept and pushes it to an extreme that contradicts what the Bible teaches.

It could be hyperbole also in many of those quotes.

Henry Morris does make an interesting statement, though: How do we know that our science is really interpreting the data correctly?



We don't "know" this. This is simply a guess, a hypothesis.

when you say 'natural science,' i can't tell if you mean the natural sciences (physics, chemistry, biology) or naturalistic science. just so i'm clear, i wasn't referring specifically to the natural sciences; i was including social science at the very least.

and i agree with you as well, science isn't the only method to rid oneself of superstition. 'the liberal arts', which sometimes include social sciences but are especially humanities, are called 'liberal' because they are thought to liberate one's mind.

as far as contribution to history, i do think it's unique because it's cumulative in ways other disciplines are not.



i'll work on it. i'd also politely suggest balancing your sources with more secular ones. to be honest, i've never even heard of 'information' as a major point of discussion in evolutionary theory. it could be that the creationists have created one elaborate straw man, or it could be that the evolutionists have convenienctly side-stepped a major flaw.

i'm searching evolution.berkeley.edu for articles on 'information loss' and coming up short. part of the problem is that every page on that site starts with "your one-stop for information on evolution."

this article is on bottlenecks: http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/bottlenecks_01

it might pertain to what you're talking about. i'm also looking for something that has more to do with long-term evolution.



*supresses a shudder*

let me just preface my following statements with this: i'm an American; I love the United States; yes, i actually would die for my country if it were for my countrymen and not the aristocrats. but i can't stand amerikkkans. in a year or two i will start grad school to leech a PhD from this country, and then i'm moving to Spain. legal gay marriage and the world's most lenient pot laws and hot mediterranean men? i'm there.

anyone ever heard of the sociological concept of brain drain?

a few years ago i was talking with an English woman about how i wanted to move out of the U.S. she said England was nice, and i mentioned i was thinking about Australia. she said something like, "don't go there, it was started by convicts!" to which i replied, "yeah, and the U.S. was started by religious fanatics." "Good point."

the way you talk about evolution makes it seem like you ascribe it agency, motivation or intent. natural phenomena do not have those characteristics, for no a priori reason anyway.



abso-freakin-lutely. the thing is, there's only a petty reason why we don't set up multi-generational experiments. many of the questions raised by evolutionary theory still wouldn't benefit much from this, but there are many many questions that would. unfortunately scientists tend to favor experiments that can be carried out on human time scales. whatever else they are, scientists are still professionals entrenched in a career field, and most of them seek advancement. good labwork isn't directly rewarded in science; discoveries are.

Chad, Cobra... i can't remember who was questioning how evolution can explain more than the emergence or supression of traits. someone was questioning how evolution can explain the emergence of whole new phyla. well, here's an article right along those lines.Explaining Major Evolutionary Change

edit: well, it's not exactly what i thought it was. sorry.

Cobra, here's an article that also somewhat has to do with 'information loss'. WWW Link (keep scrolling along the bottom).

Persoanlly, i'd not move to Spain if you want lenient Pot Laws. Holland is always good, but if you want heat and liberal attitudes, i'd say Portugal is the better Choice. I've lived in Spain and loved it. My advice however is to Stay away from any place that the British go on holiday too.
Being Welsh, i'm technically a Brit, so if I find my "own" kind bad, you'd see us as worse.lol

The way the US seems to be lately, it really does frighten me. It seems that moderate Christians and Atheists are being forced to remain quiet and the such. I wonder, do those states that are predominantly Democrat/liberal/atheist (they seem to go together), perform better economically, do more science research etc?

Edit.. I left out Homosexuals in that D/L/A. Not sure about the states, but here in the UK they talk of the spending power of the "pink pound", do you have a similar term for Dollars?

Actually, our congress went from mostly Republican to mostly Democrat. Despite perceptions, I don't think anybody is really being silenced.

Economically, I'd say Republicans do a fine job - despite the Iraq war, our economy seems to be in good condition.

I agree with evolution for the most part. All I do is question "science" belief that it so much diffrent then what came before. For when it comes to words like:


This has been said about may other religions even jews/christians/muslims have said something like this before. The bible if full of pointing out other people silly superstitions... The real problem lies in that what worked before doesn t always work later... like not eating pork which is good if you can t clean it properly even today that is important... but many "Scientist" don t look at the reasons people did these "silly" things just like other peoples before them.

To me "science" doesn t want to own up to its own evolution. Like Creationism it just sprang from the Aether.

i don't think so, but we have the concept. very funny euphemism, too.



Dragoon was actually asking about states, not the federal gov't. and to answer your question, Dragoon, i'd say "sort of, but not really."

you're basically talking about blue vs. red states (during federal elections, states that vote for the democrats are depicted in blue and states that go republican, red). the most obvious and important blue states are New York and California. i'm not too familiar with state politics in NY, but i happen to be a CA resident.

California is unusual. it fits your economic qualifiers. it's a prosperous state (it's thought it would represent the 9th largest world economy on its own); that's due partly to agriculture, and partly to the cold war engineering boom. despite popular perception, tourism is only a large part of county and city income - the state of CA doesn't get much money from tourism. between the 10 Universities of CA and over 30 CA State Universities, we've got an indominable system of high education and research (my alma mater and place of employment, UCSD, is the world's 3rd largest magnet for research grants, IIRC).

when it comes to presidential elections, CA is invariably a blue state. but gubernatorial elections are another issue: we go about 50/50 there. The Governator is a republican, but he's married to a Kennedey. Regen was CA governor before becoming President and subsequently a head in a jar on Futurama.

i'd say the biggest factor in determining all of those things you've mentioned (dem., liberal, atheist, queer-friendly, economically successful, strong research) occur in the individual most commonly as a result of education. of course there are probably more exceptions than examples to this rule.

when you go up a level, from individual to region, i think the biggest factor in the U.S. at least is the level of urbanization. rural areas tend to be poorer, inhabited by less-educated people, obviously produce no scientific research (except as field sites), and are more politically conservative. when you start getting into cities it gets complicated.



that's not bad at all; i'd never move to a forgein town where Americans frequently tour. tourism causes most perfectly respectable people to become intolerable. it's sad.

i've heard Holland ain't all it's cracked up to be. Amsterdam is great because of non-enforcement, but i've been told (by a Dutch woman) that the rest of Holland is comparatively pretty conservative. i'm not so sure i want to live in a city. i've been reading up on this issue.

see the thing is, it's not just moving i'm interested in. a few friends and i have the idea that once we've started our professional careers, we'll move to spain, buy a plot of land outside a city where we can all work, and live in a commune style. i love gardening, especially things i can eat, and i also love building and dream of building my own home. none of us harbor the goal of self-sufficiency or anything; we just want to be farther away from the center of things.

i honestly haven't looked that deeply into Portugal. i already speak a fair amount of Spanish. if gay marriage and pot laws are about equal between the two, my next biggest concern would be employment opportunity. one of my friends is leaning towards becomming a medical doctor, so that's a pretty mobile profession. i'm dead set on being a professor. know anything about the universities in the two countries? that's what information i've been having trouble finding. i actually don't know much about how the EU works. could i gain Spanish citizenship but work in France?

I dont believe in god either and I live in Greece where religion is a kind of tradition. So everybody has to believe because the family the friends believe.
I think the same happens more or less eveywhere.
Since I was kid I always wondering, hoping and afraid the idea of god.
God will help me? God will punish me? But for me always there was something wrong I could not accept this idea. So becoming a teenager started asking myself and others.
I discovered most if not all of family members, relatives and friends, they do not actually believe but they think or they do because they are used to.
So think about it do you really believe or just believe because its easier?

An other concept it might be a little sci-fiction to some people here but have u ever considered the "God" to be an other intelligent being one or more, from an other world like ours that had his part over the million years in human history.
there are many signs in history strange signs some of theme very famous difficult to explain
like Stonehedge, the Great Pyramid, drawings in caves, paintings, stories... so many that could provide evidence one day who is god or who humans saw him as a god..

Yes, if you become a citizen of any EU nation, you're free to move about. Most nations i believe don't require passports, though you would if entering the UK, but you wouldn't require a Visa.

I just had my Gradaution ceremony today, and one of my classmates is from Berlin.
He felt that German universities weren't up to scratch, though he's off to do an MA in Holland in August.

Not sure about Uni's on the continent really, the UK I'd say is closer to the US, in that our uni's are more commercial in approach, but obviosuly still have governemnt links.
The continent I think may have a closer link between authorities and uni's. I'd assume this would change entry and funding a lot.

I'd imaging that if you were a citizen, you'd be able to get some kind of funding aid.

The commune idea sounds quite nice. I've lived in Spain, and once you get into the villages and smaller towns, it's a different world. As with most places, as long as you get involved in the community and at least make an effort to speak the langauge, people will welcome you.

I figured the US system was more varied than is shown over here. Ove her, the Dems would be red, and cosnervatives blue, can add to the confusion a little. lol

Well at one time Republicans were the liberal party and the Democrates were the conservetives over here so maybe they just kept the old colors.

The Democrates can trace their party history back without hitch to Jefferson's Anti-Federalist party (the folk who wanted the states to be more like countries of their own). While the Republicans can be called the bastard children of Adam's Federalists (who becamethe Whiq party which the Republicans rebeled from and devoured.)

that's very interesting. a colleague of mine is Irish but got his bachelor's in France. he said in France there was a sort of aristocratic air permeating higher education, and that might make sense if they're less tied to commerce.

teaching in the UK might actually be a more logical choice for me. half of what i want to teach is social theory, which i could probably do best in France (they've a long tradition of it). but i'm also interested in cultural analysis, especially U.S. culture. i imagine it'd probably be easier to teach that in the UK because of its stronger cultural ties to the US.

OOPS the Whig party.