vindikat

what is the maximum blood alcohol level you are allowed to have to engage in active military combat

and is it different for infantry, pilots, drone operators, naval crewman etc.

also if you are a spy are you allowed to spy while drunk during either wartime or peacetime

lastly what if you are like a drunken master of modern military combat/spycraft, like if you are middling sober but you turn into freaking Rambo when you are drunk, would the armed forces make an exception and let you get wasted

asking for a friend

Okay so this is kind of hard to explain, but like two weeks ago my friend Becky and I went to a party at this one guy's house and she drove us in her mom's car which is a stick shift and well the party got raided. And I don't know how to drive a stick shift even though I have tried to learn three times but the trouble was at the party before it got raided Becky had like five hard lemonades and I only had like two. So I had to drive us back to her Mom's house and suddenly, when I was naturally selected to drive stick, I could. And now I can drive stick. It's pretty cool that even though Darwin lived thousands of years ago you can still see his theories working today.

Always wondered about this. Did God actually fertilize Mary's egg with 50% of his own DNA, or DNA he made up, and combine that with her DNA as you would a normal pregnancy? Or did he create the Jesus zygote entirely, with 100% new genetic information, and just implant it directly into the wall of her uterus, bypassing her DNA entirely?

Exodus 11:1–12:36:

'About midnight I will go throughout Egypt. Every firstborn son in Egypt will die, from the firstborn son of Pharaoh, who sits on the throne, to the firstborn son of the slave girl, who is at her hand mill, and all the firstborn of the cattle as well. There will be loud wailing throughout Egypt—worse than there has ever been or ever will be again.'

I really wonder about this. Christians, do you personally feel that this act of God - killing innocent children - was justified? Do you support what He did in the context of the situation? Do you believe that He did the right thing? Do you understand the wisdom of the choice God made when he killed the children?

It seems pretty clear to me that this, if you take the bible story literally, was a monstrous thing for God to do. Any honest person has to conclude that God, just because he has the power to kill innocent children, should not go around doing so. But if you say that, you're questioning God. So if you believe in the God of the Bible, somehow you aren't allowed to honor your own honest analysis of this act.

All children deserve a mother AND a father, including God's children! We're made in God's image, so he should take a wife instead of trying to raise us on his own.

That's probably why the divorce rate is so high, right?

So I was reading about that newly discovered extrasolar planet that is maybe-maybe not in the 'habitable' zone, meaning its mass and distance from the star are such that it could potentially have liquid water and an atmosphere to support life. Just for giggles I decided to see how long it would take our fastest spacecraft to get there.

It turns out the record for spacecraft speed goes to something called the helios probes which back in the seventies were clocked at 157,078 mph. So say that's our speed. Gliese 581g aka the goldilocks planet is 20.5 light years away. A light year is about six trillion miles. I crunched that - six trillion times 20.5, divided by 157,078, then divided by 24, then divided by 365 - and the result was that it would take our fastest spacecraft about 9,000 years to get to Gliese 581g.

So, yeah. We are NEVER going there. I don't care if the human race survives until the sun explodes, I don't care what tech we build, as long as lightspeed travel is impossible - and all of science tells us it is - nobody is ever going to fund or man or power an expedition that takes nine thousand years. We're never going to this planet. We're never sending a probe there. We're never going to see what it looks like on the surface, unless there's already someone living there with a camera and a big-*** radio transmitter who's willing to send us a picture. It is totally, permanently out of our reach.

And then I realized something. I misplaced the decimal. It isn't nine thousand years; it's NINETY thousand years.

Seriously, what the F? What is the point of that? It could be nine thousand years and it would already take so ridiculously long that we'd never have any hope of reaching it. But no, it has to be TEN TIMES that far away. When I told you it would take nine thousand years, you were probably impressed. That's a really long time. Nine thousand years ago people hadn't even thought about building anything that even looked like a pyramid. But when I say NINETY thousand years, you just glaze over. It doesn't mean anything anymore.

What does space need with all that freaking space?

Do you stay married in heaven if you got married in this life? And if so, can you still have sex? I wonder if the church would be against that since presumably there's no chance of procreation. But it seems kind of lame if marriages in heaven all become sexless marriages.

I'm honestly curious about this. Suppose God was still real, still wants your love, and is still responsible for giving you the gift of THIS life on earth. He's still glorious and still the creator of the entire universe. But there's no afterlife, no promise of a reward after death. Would you still love him and worship him? Would you still thank him for the blessing of THIS life, the one you already have? Would you worship him JUST BECAUSE he's glorious? Or his heaven a deal-breaker for you?

I get the sense that maltheism is pretty much overlooked in this section

come on, maltheist community, step up and represent

How would we even know it had happened? Maybe it's already happened.

It seems like most religious people think that everything that happens to you in the next life is based on one choice, or a couple of choices, you make in THIS life. In the afterlife, heaven OR hell, do you no longer have the ability to change? To grow? To develop? It seems like in most belief models things are just happening to you, but you don't have the ability to alter or change the experience, for good or bad, according to who you are and what you may want.

That doesn't seem like an afterlife, or any kind of life at all to me. What important decisions and choices are left for you to make in the afterlife?

Could God create the universe, and then eliminate Himself? Maybe He gets bored with being omnipotent.

And we wind up with a Godless universe.

He could either actually kill Himself, or just demote Himself so that he's not God anymore.

This is what happens when you stab the earth, BP! It bleeds! It is bleeding black blood all over the gulf of Mexico. Soon it will go into shock and die. And then we will have to try to shock it back to life with huge electrical towers or something like that.

Ten million years from now the entire Bush family will be dead and buried and and gradually converted into oil

I mean, if you were born the first time in another country.

My guess is that altogether we must be around fifty thousand years old.