nick s

Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, Jebusites, , Philistines; Gazathites, Ashdothites, Eshkalonites, Gittites, Ekronites; Avites,

Jerusalem, Hebron, Jarmuth, Lachish, the Eglon, Jericho, Ai, Gezer, Debir, Geder, Hormah, Arad, Libnah, Adullam, Makkedah, Beth-el, Tappuah, Hepher, Aphek, Lasharon, Madon, Hazor, Shimron-meron, Achshaph, Taanach, Megiddo, Kedesh, Jokneam of Carmel, Dor, Gilgal, TirzahAroer, Dibon Sihon Heshbon, Ammon Gilead, Geshurites, Maachathites, Bashan, Salcah, Og, Ashtaroth, Edrei

They all have Abraham as their forefather and they all believe they were enslaved by Egypt and escaped through Moses. If so, the Israelites were ancestors to Jews and Arabs. Following on from that, Israel is the promised land for them all. So, why can they not share Israel?

The Bible is full of references to the importance of making burnt offerings to God. Why are people not doing that now?

You have 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great grandparents, and so on. The number of your ancestors doubles every generation.

If you do this for 40 generations (about 1000 years) you come up with a number that is over 1 trillion, which of course is far in excess of the number of people on Earth 1000 years ago.

How can this be?

Yes, it is a science question. And, no, it is not that he chopped the heads off his queens.

The guy asked "Why does the moon appear to be moving with us when we are travelling by train?"

He then chose as best answer:

"The farther the object is, the slower it appears to move"

Which does not answer the question, but is just another way of saying that distant objects, like the moon, appear to not move away as we move along.

What is worse is that the answer got three ticks. Astronomy and Space attracts some real kooks.

The question was "what does the Earth's axial inclination mean"

The first answers gave links to Google, Wikipedia etc, which is good, but I like to give people a visualization. So, I said:

"Yeh, it's OK giving those links, but you need some visualization. If you imagine Earth's orbit around the sun as a disk, in a perfect universe, Earth would circle around that disk in an upright posture; ie, the Equator lines up with the disk, and the axis through the poles, perpendicular to the disk.

But it isn't a perfect universe, as the Earth's axis is tilted 23 degrees off that perpendicular."

Someone reported me for that. Would it be for my saying the Universe is not perfect? Can anyone get one's answer taken off for any reason at all, without producing a good reason?

I am mystified. I was trying to be helpful.

Yes, well, it's not really a question as such, just my annual publishing of the silliest ones I have collected.

Note these are genuine, and do not include 2012 questions. You must see the last one - it takes the cake.

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ARE YOU SURE THE EARTH IS RELLY CERCULER?

ok ok, racently i posted a question asking if the earth is flat. eveyone says it s round and cerculer. are you sure?

Supposedly we landed on the Moon in 1969, but how did we get there? The space shuttle launch videos show the shuttle going up into the sky, but you would have to dig through the ground to get out of Earth.

If the earth is round why doesn’t the water of the earth just fall below space?

Instead of going UP to space why don't we go out of the SIDE of the Earth?

Do you think our planet will ever sink?

Why has the antartic not fallen off the earth since gravity holds things down and the antartic is at bottom?

Does the sun orbit the Earth or the Earth orbit the sun?

What colour is the dark side of the sun?

Do you believe in dinosaurs?

Where does the moon set – East or West?

I’ve just watched the moon disappear down behind a mountain in the last few minutes. Is thls normal?

Does earth's gravitational pull relate to personal health? Lots of people I know got sick or injured last week

Why does the sun rise in the East and set in the West at the same time every day?

Can the sun rise at noon or even set in the east instead of the west?

Why can’t you see the moon in the daytime?

What do you suppose is on the dark side of the moon?

Are stars ever covered by clouds?

Where do the stars go during the day?

Where do the stars come from when it gets dark?

Is it always dark on the moon?

If the Earth stops spinning, will we all fly off?

With my telescope looking at the moon, I cannot see the footprints from the astronauts, the American flag that was left, nor any debris.

I saw the moon in daylight and it was a half moon. How can that be possible if the Earth’s shadow is supposed to eclipse it

Why haven’t they used the space shuttles to go to the moon?

What causes the phases of the moon?

Why is the North Star the brightest in the sky?

How many constellations are there in the galaxy?

Is It Possible That Global Warming Is Caused By the Earth Getting Closer To The Sun???

How come we see the moon in the day but not the sun at night?

What do the smart people think?

I think we do because we educated people cannot believe that humans can be so ignorant.

Do you realise that Apollo was an American enterprise and still the greatest acheivement of mankind, but the greatest number of disbelievers are Americans. How can that be?

Well, it is easy – education. For instance. a great percentage of American schools teach creationism as a science. When you have this level of ignorance then anything can be pumped into young minds. Many kids and adults simply haven’t got the education to be able to see through what charlatans feed into their minds.

Without a rounded education, people are unable to even think for themselves and stop and think “wait a minute 400,000 people worked on Apollo, how could they all be scammed – how could they not talk? Or ‘wait a minute, if it was missiles that hit the WTC, who would keep the airlines quiet when they have supposedly lost 4 planes and hundreds of passengers”.

It really doesn’ take much for people with a bit of science and some kind of anti-establishment agenda to pull the wool over the eyes of young impressionable minds.

By the way, a new orbiter that NASA has surveying the moon has just taken pictures of the landing sites – it shows the equipment left behind and even the trails left by the astronauts as the moved around the area.

But I suppose the fools who believe in the hoax will see this is a another hoax.

The point is that if you argue with a creationist how millions of species could have been squeezed into boat built by a primitive farmer, and many of those animals having to come from Australia, South America, the Arctic, etc etc, and you still can’t get through to them, then what chance have we got to convince those that are obviously more excited by what they believe is a conspiracy, rather than be excited by the sheer magnificance of the achievement of the Apollo missions.

My God, the kiddies are obsessed with the end of the world, whether it is later today with the LHC or 2012 with some silly so-called prediction..

Well, kiddies, at least the Large Hadron Collider is real, but it’s a pity that the wonders of this machine are lost in an ocean of mushy pseudo-science that seems to grab the attention of tiny minds.

Do you more mature people out there think there is some kind of mass death wish out there?

...than all the REAL exciting stuff?

What is this fascination with aliens, area 51, end of the world in 2012?

Most people know nothing concrete about space – most don’t even know what causes the phases of the moon.

Last night watching an old “Who wants to be a millionaire” the question was “what planet did the rover “Spirit” explore?” – the guy got it down to Venus and Mars, but used his “phone a friend”. The friend told him “Venus”, so he went with Venus.

Jeez, these are fantastic achievements in our time, and all we get is aliens (for which there is zero evidence), Area 51 (which is pure fantasy), and this 2012 end of the world stuff (the 5000th wacky prediction in history).

Most people have a medieval knowledge of space. Why is that?

I just answered the question below about whether dinosaurs existed. Apart from the pure senselessness of the question, I cannot believe that someone would answer as follows:

“Well I'm not sure, I think I believe in dinosaurs but i do not believe in aliens”.

How can anyone mentioned belief for dinosaurs and aliens in one sentence. For dinosaurs there are millions of bone samples, and displayed in some of the greatest museums in the world. The number of scientists working in a field related to the study of dinosaurs would be in the millions. The identification of fossils and bones dug up would be based on science dating back 2500 years to the Ancient Greeks. They can find a single small bone these days and are able to identify which animal it came from.

People working in the field, devoting years to of their lives to carefully and painstakingly scrape these things out of rock, have incovered whole skeletons on occasions, revealing at times ancient animals 100 feet long.

I got this from a site and it says all the things I needed to say in reply to the idiotic notion that the WTC was brought down by controlled explosions:

Even those who believe this, there has to have been United and American airliners, otherwise you have to suppose that the govt had to keep all the airline personnel quiet, which is of course ridiculous.

When you consider the number of individuals involved in planning and execution, the explosive experts, the demolition professionals, the building engineers, the missile launch and maintenance personnel, the air traffic controllers and air base personnel, the kidnappers who had to remove the civilians from the planes and kill or hide them forever, the aircraft maintenance personnel who modified the planes, the agencies or organizations that provided the explosives, missiles, and planes, the pilots or robotic flight programmers to fly the planes, and God knows who else… the number of direct conspirators would have to be in hundreds

Creationists believe a specific order of creation events as described in the Bible.

They cannot get it into their heads that science is not like that, at least not until a theory is set in concrete. But nobody knows the absolute sequence of evolution, so the word evolutionist is ridiculous.

It is like being called a spherical Earther. Some kind of evolution is as obvious as the Earth is round. The world is changing all the time in contrast to the Biblical belief that the world is as God created it.

For instance, I have just found a picture of a village I saw 50 years ago as a kid, and the village is now at least 100 meters closer to the sea, as the sea has eroded the cliffs in that time. That shows there is some evolving going on.

Evolution is not something you believe, like some Bible story, it is soemthing you see and know.

Does the term evolutionist hack other people off as well?

They probably won't read this, but here goes:

I always put forward the Noah story to show the futility of believing the Bible explicitly. We know now that there are 10s of thousands of animal species that would need to be saved in the event of a flood that supposedly turned over the whole Earth’s crust (creationists argument for geological layers and scientists’ mis-aging of fossils).

How would Noah get all over the world to pick up a sloth and jaguar in South America, a kangaroo in Australia, a giant tortoise in the Galapogas, etc, etc, etc?

How would he get tens of thousands of species pairs into the ark?

The last time I put this to a creationist, he came back and said that all those animals were living in Noah’s vicinity at the time.

That rests the case doesn’t it?

They get all this crap info on TV and the internet and spread it around without sitting down and thinking. For example:

Moon landing hoax: How could the govt fool 400,000 people that worked on Apollo for 11 years that 6 moon landing simulations over 3 years were real?

Govt brings down the World Trade Center: If it wasn’t hijacked United and American airliners that did it, don’t these people wonder why when watching the videos of 9/11, all the hundreds of personnel working for those airlines weren’t screaming “we didn’t lose any airliners that day”.

Mars appearing as big as the Moon: Doesn’t this one get you? If people thought for a just a minute, such a scenario would be huge for Earth’s tides, and it would be all over the daily newspapers.

That is so ignorant and uninformed. When Apollo was cancelled, geologists and astonomers were devastated. There were a million questions not answered about the moon.

Do you people really think that from 6 tiny landing spots on an area the size of Asia they were able to find out everything they wanted to know about the moon?

All astronomers and geologists would want to go to the moon. Apollo was cancelled due to budget cuts.

And to use the fact that we haven’t been back as some kind of proof we never went is so stupid. We haven’t got a supersonic airliner any more, so I suppose Concorde, which was 1960s technology like Apollo, was a hoax too.

Jeez, there is some real ignorance about space out there, and sometimes I get scared the internet and emails are helping to spread more ignorance than knowledge.

….and light is just part of the electro-magnetic spectrum, does that mean that all EM radiation is made up of photons?

When reading about photons, I only recall them being mentioned in relation to light. If they are only peculiar to that tiny part of the EMR spectrum, I am confused.

….just to get our backs up?

Someone on Earth Science just asked “why does the sun always set in the sea….and wouldn’t the water put it out?”.

Often we get this sort of inane question on Astronomy.

Can anyone really be that naïve? I find it hard to believe.