Religious freedom is being mangled by the leftists into two things. You can go to your church. You can pray at home. Your religion goes nowhere else.

That's BS. Preventing religion from creeping into places it doesn't belong is not an infringement of your religious freedom. "Religious freedom" doesn't include the opportunity to wedge it into other people's lives via government.

Because as much as some are willing to embrace or at least accept the homosexual lifestyle, most of us will not accept this twisted head game of transgender as being anything but a sick perversion. It will never be accepted as "normal" by the mainstream of society.

I don't question that some people have an innate compulsion to change their gender or sex, a compulsion that when suppressed has a destructive impact on their emotional stability. I don't think that it's the flippant decision that many people make it out to be.

I do think that it will become more accepted as time goes on and awareness grows. How accommodating society has to be to that, however, is a really big, complicated question.

GIGO-
The study said it was PARENT REPORTED, meaning the parents gave "the right answer" to the survey questions.  I do not trust the testing and data collection methodology.

Parent reporting was used to determine religiosity and the "parent-reported child empathy and sensitivity to justice". However, objective testing was used to determine altruistic behavior.

To generalize: As religiosity goes up, parent-reported pro-social behavior goes up, but tested pro-social behavior actually goes down.

I'd be interested in seeing follow-on research that attempts to explain what is causing these results.

While it is generally accepted that religion contours people’s moral judgments and prosocial behavior, the relation between religiosity and morality is a contentious one. Here, we assessed altruism and third-party evaluation of scenarios depicting interpersonal harm in 1,170 children aged between 5 and 12 years in six countries (Canada, China, Jordan, Turkey, USA, and South Africa), the religiousness of their household, and parent-reported child empathy and sensitivity to justice. Across all countries, parents in religious households reported that their children expressed more empathy and sensitivity for justice in everyday life than non-religious parents. However, religiousness was inversely predictive of children’s altruism and positively correlated with their punitive tendencies.

http://www.cell.com/action/showExperimentalProcedures?pii=S0960-9822%2815%2901167-7

You're going back to your straw man again!  :mad:

I was responding to the guy who started the thread, specifically about the post he started the thread with.

I assumed he was referring to global warming's affect on the Artic ice sheet. If I'm incorrect about that, I apologize for mischaracterizing the point he was trying to make. Maybe he's just an Arctic ice sheet enthusiast.

What I don't get is:
The Earth for all practical purposes is a closed system, meaning nothing gained or lost by any actors ON the surface.  We take stuff from underground, put it on top of the ground, change the form of materials by burning them (combined with Oxygen - part of our atmosphere) and take things from one part of the globe to another part.  The net change (for practicality's sake) is still zero.

As far as matter goes, it's true that we don't gain or lose much. It's practically a zero sum game.

However, we don't have a matter problem, we have an energy problem. As far as energy goes, the planet is not a closed system. We get a very large amount of energy from the sun. Maintaining the relative equilibrium that we've come to over the ages requires that a certain amount of that energy is released back out into space.

The problem that we're facing now is that we're keeping more of that energy, due to the increasing greenhouse effect of the environment, and this is heating the planet.

Humans aren't creating the energy, but we are contributing towards changes in the atmosphere that are keeping the energy in our system instead of letting it be released back into space.

Why argue it?  I'll concede, man is a factor, so what?

That's all I'm trying to get across.

I'm not that interested in climate policy, but in general, I can't stand when people base their political ideologies on clearly anti-intellectual viewpoints. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not to their own facts.

Nice straw man. Right out of the box.

That wasn't my intention. My fault for being vague. Let me clarify:

There is an overwhelming amount of evidence supporting that man has influenced climate change. You can argue about how involved the government should get, what moral obligations we have to try to affect it, and other matters of opinion, but simply denying it is ignorant.