We’ve known that birds were descended from dinosaurs for a long time. Best I can tell, it was first proposed in the 1800’s, largely abandoned by the early 1900’s and then revived in the 1970’s. It was not new information about the lineage of birds that caused us to start saying ‘birds are dinosaurs’, but a different method of classification: Cladistics.
We had known that birds are descended from dinosaurs well before the general public and the majority of paleontologists starting saying “birds are dinosaurs”. So simply saying that “we discovered that birds are descended from dinosaurs” is not sufficient to answering your question.
Traditional taxonomy allows for paraphyletic groups, meaning that not all of the descendants of the most recent common ancestor of the group are required to be in that group. So in this case, even though it was known that birds are descended from dinosaurs, they continued to be considered two separate groups, with dinosaurs being a paraphyletic group. Birds were known first, dinosaurs were later discovered and were considered a distinct group, then the link between the the two groups was discovered, but how they were grouped did not immediately change. That birds were not considered to be dinosaurs was a rather arbitrary effect based on how they were discovered and not on any scientific basis.
One book on dinosaurs from 1997 wrote:
So why the change? There is a trend in science to prefer cladistic classification, which requires every group to be a clade, meaning that all descendants of the most recent common ancestor of a group are in the group. This effectively means that paraphyletic grouping is being abandoned. So with cladistic taxonomy birds are dinosaurs.
There are other traditionally paraphyletic groups that are still in the process of changing. For example traditionally monkeys were a paraphyletic group, but any clade that includes all monkeys necessarily includes the apes, so in cladistics apes are monkeys. Though, you will still hear many people say ‘apes are not monkeys’. Fish was also a paraphyletic group, which included all vertebrates except tetrapods, but of course in cladistics, tetrapods are fish.
Onan’s crime was greed not lust. He did not want to provide for Tamar or her potential children.
Yes, from a superficial viewpoint they are similar. And from a superficial viewpoint shooting a practice target is similar to shooting a person dead. It would be rather stupid to refer to target practice as murder.
It’s onanism in English. And it’s rather stupid to call it that because Onan didn’t masturbate, he used the pull out method to avoid getting his sister-in-law pregnant with his brother’s kid. (yes, I know that sounds weird but that’s the story)
Apparently I have to say this again. Those are MY opinions. The goal of me sharing my opinions point out a position that I suspected would not be accepted by the scouts, at least your in interpretation of their rules. Your response was that atheists that did not believe the same as me could be accepted, which was irrelevant to the point. And here you insult me. Congratulations, you have confirmed my suspicions.
The UU MOU demonstrates that they still discriminate. Any Christian denomination is automatically acceptable, for atheists they have to pick and choose saying “you’re one of the good ones”.
If a scout wishes to define god as thermodynamics, BSA accepts it.
OK, that’s irrelevant. Those were clearly MY opinions, a demonstration of how I refuse to label things with the term ‘god’, followed by the rationale for me doing so.
You are using a completely different, contradictory definition.
I am not using any definition of ‘god’, I am just saying that it has a definition, not any specific one just some definition, otherwise the term would be meaningless. And if I were to label anything ‘god’ it would be because that thing fulfilled the requirements for this unspecified definition. If I were to label something as ‘red’ it would be because it fulfills the requirements to be called ‘red’. If it did not fit the definition of ‘red’ I would not apply the label ‘red’. In the same way, I would not label something as ‘god’ unless I thought the label fit. If I were to label something as ‘god’ it would imply that there was something different about it when compared to something that I would refuse to apply the term ‘god’ to. And there is nothing that I would be willing to label ‘god’.
The UU memorandum of understanding is irrelevant. I am not a member, and I think most atheists are not either. People should not be required to join a church or a religion to join the scouts.
I don’t believe in any gods, and would never say that something was a god if I did not think it was a god. Consciousness is not a god, nature is not a god, the laws of thermodynamics are not gods. Labeling these things gods only serves to imply some sort of mystery thing about it when there is none, I would consider it lying to do so. Do you think they would accept me? I don’t.
If the religious aspects were truly left to the scouts and their families, outright atheists would simply be accepted, and there would not need to be a memorandum of understanding so that a specific organization could participate, because they would have simply been accept beforehand.
You are suggesting that it is acceptable to for scouts that do not believe in any god to lie and say that they do. Dishonesty goes against the scout principles.
Treating the oath as something that can be worked around using wordplay does nothing but make a complete mockery of the oath. We had this debate a over century ago when trial witnesses were required to swear an oath to god and atheists were prevented from being witnesses. The solution wasn’t to allow atheists to use god as a metaphor for reality, but to remove the requirement for a belief in a god.
So, they should be worried about the far right.